ABSTRACT
The cultural nationalism of 1990s Britpop has been generally regarded as ‘a circling of the wagons’, a defensive reaction against the perceived threat of multiculturalism and American cultural hegemony.1 These tensions have not dissipated, and in the last decade they have been augmented by concerns about devolution, greater European expansion and integration (the spectre of the Euro), and, in the aftermath of 9/11, wars (on Iraq and ‘terror’) and their impact on thinking about multiculturalism. Where Britpop was implicated in the production of a nostalgic, hybridity-erasing and appealing form of Britishness (even if it was Englishness ‘writ large’), identity politics in Britain have in the interim changed to include a debate about Englishness. Citing the proliferation of scholarly and general publications on this topic, David McCrone argues that there has never ‘been such interest in the English question as there is today’.2 As the ‘old hegemonies which secured taken-for-granted meanings for the terms “British” or “English”’3 have fragmented, so ‘the English are for the first time having to confront seriously the question faced previously by many nations: who are we?’4 Formulating an answer to this English question is difficult for a number of interrelated reasons: the English are not used to thinking about this question; Englishness is often subsumed by Britishness; regional identification is still very strong; and there are a variety of possible ‘Englishnesses’ from which to choose.5 In this chapter, I want to look at this range of possible Englishnesses in the context of the new generation of English guitar bands that sprouted almost exactly a decade after Oasis released (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
